The Witness Chronicles, Part Duh
An inevitable recession?
The Impending Trump Recession
A perfect storm of their own making
I mentioned this recently and the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seems. Trump obsesses over numbers, and his favorite is his favorability rating, but that number also comes with an unfavorability rating and they are nearly 50/50. Specifically, 52% favorable, 47% unfavorable.
His unfavorability rating was never anywhere near that high in his first term, when the positive number never got above 50%. In fact he had the lowest positive rating of any President in recent times. This time around the negative number is far higher and the reason is becoming obvious: people are seriously concerned about inflation and rising prices. And, while there is not a lot a sitting President can do to lower those numbers, there is a lot he can do to make them worse.
And he appears to be doing everything he can to plunge us into a recession with his tariffs, his tax cuts for the wealthy, and his desire to raise the debt ceiling as proposed in the recently unveiled Republican House budget.
The tax cuts alone will increase our national debt by an estimated $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. He announced a 25% tariff, across the board, for any imported steel or aluminum from any country, which will raise the prices of everything from appliances to automobiles.
This week, Mitch McConnell wrote a letter estimating that the current increase in tariffs so far will cost the average citizen of Kentucky, the state he represents, by $1200/year. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, he has just pickpocketed a hundred bucks from every household in the country, every month. That includes all the households that voted for him, expecting prices to fall.
In a bit of unusual honesty, immediately after the election, he told an interviewer that there is nothing he can do to lower prices, basically admitting that he lied continually during his campaign with his promises to bring prices down. Another betrayal.
The House budget proposal gives Trump everything he wants but he has a problem there too as the far right Freedom Caucus is once again threatening to scuttle it unless they make even bigger cuts to spending. This means we are right back where we’ve been as long as these guys have been in the majority. That is to say, nowhere with nothing getting done.
Food prices were one of the two most popular reasons Trump was elected, with immigration the other. As I’ve written about multiple times, these two issues are intimately related because migrant labor does much of the heavy lifting in farming and food production.
The farm industry is waking up to the reality of what their guy is doing to them and they are struggling to deal with it. My question for them is, did you think your illegal immigrant labor was somehow exempt from Trump’s promised deportation of millions and millions of illegals?
And the freeze on promised payments to farmers for money already spent on infrastructure could lead to a wave of bankruptcies across agriculture.
So, inflation rising, prices headed up on everything, bankruptcies, food rotting in the fields, and skyrocketing national debt, all add up to a long lasting recession. And that adds up to strong negative approval ratings for you know who.
As he has done with the latest inflation numbers, he will blame Biden but that horse has left the barn. They are his problem now. Maybe he will shift blame elsewhere, maybe to his co-president Elon if we are lucky. Elon has his own problems as the media are digging deeper into his web of connections with the government and uncovering conflicts with his DOGE cuts in practically every instance of freezes and firings.
As I was writing this, news came that Trump ordered automatic reciprocal tariffs, meaning if any country puts a tariff on our goods, we will automatically match it, bringing the tariff craze to a peak and threatening the global economy with a massive trade war that no one can win.
Piggyback that on top of this week’s cozying up to Putin and Defense Secretary Hegseth’s stern lecture reneging on our agreements with NATO and we have majorly pissed off another huge trading partner, the countries of the European Union, while helping the Russia China bloc.
When you break everything in sight, with no thought for the consequences, those consequences will come back to haunt you in ways not foreseen. A Trump recession looks more and more like one of those effects.
Arrogance on a scale never before seen in modern politics is behind this. It is obvious that Trump and his minions are unconcerned about the future of the American people, only about their own interests and their obsession with retribution and revenge.
As a Buddhist, I believe that focusing entirely on the negative will ultimately tip things in the other direction, as people get sick of this constant stream of hate and fear and greed. But we did elect this guy again so maybe I am wrong about that. I hope not.
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Martin Edic
Is it arrogance or planning? Trump was never good at thinking ahead, but others around him are. For example, Bill Gates is buying up agricultural land, just in time for the flood of bankruptcies. This is a pay to play Presidency, how do you think Jared got $2 billion? The only people who won’t get anything are his voters. LOL!